My Dad’s English Muffins

I have made some unusual baked items while living in Hawaii. I had a sourdough recipe for sweet potato muffins and one of the nut pickers gave me some purple sweet potatoes which are very popular here. So I baked up some purple muffins!

Purple Muffins

The crumb of the muffin was a bit purplish greenish. The muffins tasted great, but looked a bit odd. They were gobbled up quickly except my picky 11 year old son wouldn’t try them…purple muffins???

I also tried to bake up some loaves of Papaya Sourdough bread. I wondered how the papain enzyme would react with the gluten. But I thought I would try anyway….wrong!The gluten was completely eaten up by the papaya enzyme and I had to throw the whole batch away. It was interesting though.

The picture shows one of my sons with his hand in the goop. Once we knew it was going to be tossed, we had fun playing in the dough. It felt so gluey! The dough was supposed to be 64% hydration!

I wonder if a very small amount of papaya might be used to control flour which is too strong or used in small amounts in batter breads for a soft dough. So this was my missed Papaya Bread:

Papaya Bread??

I did bake up some nice banana bread using bananas grown right here on the property we are living on:

Sourdough Banana Bread

My best surprise is that my dad said to me recently, “You will never guess what I have been up to.” No, I couldn’t guess!

He said he was griddling up some English Muffins!What a wonderful surprise! Now I know where the baking came from in the family! I told him I would show off his English Muffins on my blog. So here they are:

Dad's English Muffins

For the last post I offered a free sourdough starter to one of the posters. My daughter picked number 15 which is Frances Holly. Frances, email me your contact info and your choice of starter to “northwestsourdough at gmail.com”.

I decided to offer a free starter for this week as well. I will send a free Hawaiian sourdough starter to one of the people who post a nice comment about my dad’s english muffins in this post.

Also we are having a Ciabatta Challenge during the rest of the month of October at the forum: